


The Raven That Refused to Sing

by Rubyshade



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Glossectomy, I didn't spend a half hour looking at different cereal grains on wikipedia for nothing, I have a problem and it's too much research, I'm pretty sure it's intense, Illustrated, Mute Corvo Attano, Mutilation, Prison, Prisonbreak, Torture, a description of being shot, a sad ending kind of, a very brief moment of genital-related tension but it's not sexy, also for appropriate coldwater fish, and vegetables too, canon-compliant prison food, coldridge prison, how many things can I tag this with before a tag wrangler comes to my house and slaps me, interim fic, now with an illustration by yours truely! I couldn't resist, scabs, some pretty intense violence, title blatantly stolen from the Steven Wilson album of the same name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-13 22:14:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11769471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubyshade/pseuds/Rubyshade
Summary: Coldridge didn't break Corvo all at once. At first, he did what anyone in his position might do--he tried to escape.





	1. Bones

          The only thing he can think is that Coldridge Prison lives up to its name. He removes his wool coat in a processing room, watches as a member of the watch throws it into a crate on top of fifteen others. He wonders if he’ll ever see that coat again. They strip him to his shirt and vest, take his boots and leave him barefoot and shivering in the wet chill of the prison. It still feels like great, invisible hands are wrapped around him, holding him immobile. The guards have to prod him from room to room.

          “Put him in B5,” someone says.

          When he sees the yellow B5 painted on the ground before a dark cell, it’s as if he awakes from a dream.

It’s not a cell.

It’s _his_ cell.

“No,” he says. His voice quivers. “No.” He jerks to life, bare feet searching for traction on the concrete floor. One of the guards grunts as he shuffles backward, but the cell only looms closer. His arms are pinned behind his back, and he can only push his weight uselessly against the men behind him as they throw him down to the cold floor. The bars shut with a bang behind him. He scrambles to his feet, swears at their backs, rattles the door frantically.

“Oh, man,” says the woman in B6, the cell next to him. “Try pulling a little harder, mate. I think you’ve almost got it.”

“No no, I think he’s onto something,” says the man in the cell across from him. “I think that if he pulls really, really hard on the bars, he _might_ be able to move them.”

“Blow off, choffer.”

          Corvo hears but isn’t listening, trying uselessly to shove himself between the bars. He bellows every insult he knows, derogatory epithets about them, their mothers, their honor and their manhood. All his years of loving service to a woman not three hours dead, and this is how they repay him?

“Yelling only makes it worse,” calls the same woman. Her voice is accented—she must be from inland. “They really don’t like yelling. Ask me how I know.”

He screams over the woman in B6 until his voice gives out and becomes wet sobs. When his eyes run dry, he wills himself into a restless sleep, hoping that when he awakes, he will be back in his room, and Jessamine will be alive again. 

===

It doesn’t happen. Corvo awakens in the same cold, dark cell. He gets to his feet mechanically, stiff with cold. He can’t think about Emily’s screams, his feet kicking in midair as the air is squeezed from his lungs: he can’t think about the blood soaking the flagstones. So instead he surveys his cell—a chilly floor of chipping concrete, walls painted green up to his elbow, also chipping. A concrete outcrop, presumably to be used as a bed. A tin bucket in the corner. He grimaces.

He focuses on the outside instead as he swallows his first prison meal, a bowl of thin and salty oats served with a half vial of red elixir. Corvo isn’t sure which one tastes worse. The woman in B6 is named Jenny, and she loves to talk. It’s an endless stream of chatter with the man across from him, interrupted every few minutes by a guard yelling for quiet. Things they miss about the outside world, the existence of the Outsider, a game of Nancy with cards Corvo guesses they make up. It occurs to him that this must be her coping mechanism. They recall good times and good brawls while Corvo shivers in his cell. He tunes it out. He can’t bear the sound of someone acting like imprisonment is normal.

He spends five days stewing in his own escape plans, pacing his cell to keep warm. They come on the sixth and wrestle him to the ground, hauling him to the interrogation room and clamping him into a cold chair. The room is lit by an unearthly blaze of whale-oil from above, the long bulbs humming. He has been here before, at Jessamine’s side. Burrows is there with the High Overseer and another man. Corvo hopes it’s not who he thinks it is, and instead looks longingly at Burrows’ red coat. The chill of the concrete seems to have permeated his bones. He notes a brazier not far from the chair, sitting grey and cold. He doesn’t know if he should be relieved that they won’t be branding him today, or wary of what they might do instead.

 “How unfortunate to see you here, Corvo,” begins Burrows, leaning in. Corvo hocks the biggest wad of spit he can and spits at him. It lands between the Regent’s neck and the soft red velvet with a satisfying, wet _thwack_. Burrows jerks back with a wordless cry of disgust, and Corvo allows himself a feral smile. High Overseer Campbell offers him a handkerchief.

“I am here to offer you _mercy_ , you ungrateful piece of shit,” Burrows hisses after dabbing frantically at his collar. Corvo wonders if the newly minted Lord Regent will bother to change while he’s here, or if his spit will soak in to chill his neck. He hopes for the latter. Let him freeze.

“I’ve come to offer you what’s almost as good as freedom, considering your current circumstances,” Burrows spits. “I’m offering you the chance to clear your name before your execution. And in generous partnership with the High Overseer of the Abbey,” he gestures to Campbell, “I’m offering to have your spirit laid to rest afterwards, so that you might pass from this world without undue suffering, and without falling prey to the deceit and untoward ends of the Outsider.

 “All you have to do,” he says, unrolling a scroll from the desk, “is sign a document confessing to the cruel and uncalled-for murder of our late, fair empress Jessamine Kaldwin and the arrangement of the kidnapping of her daughter, the beloved Lady Emily.”

Corvo’s stomach turns to ice, then he snarls in rage. He channels the fury sweeping through his chest and speaks.

“I’ve given my life’s service to protect the Empress, _Spymaster_ , and I wouldn’t throw a single moment of that away to save my own skin. I’ll serve the _Kaldwins_ until the day you have. My. Head.”

Burrow’s face tightens, and he steps away. Corvo is feeling almost triumphant until Burrows turns to the silent man in the corner and says, “Break his toes.”

Corvo had never cared for the Royal Interrogator, a title that rang too clean for what he’d seen in this very room at Jessamine’s side. He’d been told by Burrows that the man was a necessary evil to keep the Empire safe, for the information he extracted often led to foiled assassination attempts or criminal ring busts. Jessamine saw the necessity as well, though she often confided in him that the unspeaking interrogator unnerved her. Though it had been none of Corvo’s business, he would have rather seen a more stable man in the position.

And now here he is, where he thought he’d never be, on the wrong side of the torturer’s chair.

The Interrogator looks him in the eyes, then picks up a pair of long, hefty tongs, like the bolt cutters used to open plague houses. He looks down at Corvo’s terrifyingly bare feet. Corvo’s heart rate spikes, and his stomach turns. He braces himself as the Interrogator takes the smallest toe on his left foot and begins to bend it back.

For a moment, the pain is bearable. The pinch of the tongs is no worse than the Serkonan crabs he’d provoked as a child on the beach. Then his muscles begin to complain, the ligaments in the arch of his foot pulled beyond their limits. Corvo grits his teeth as it escalates, first an ache, then searing pain. In a moment, the little bones break with a visceral crunch. He gulps in air as stars bloom before his eyes, flings his head back. His muscles spasm, and he tries to bring them under control. He will not give Burrows the satisfaction of watching him suffer.

He gazes at his bent toe, distantly noting the unnatural angle and the beginnings of a bruise, when the tongs grasp his next toe and begin to bend it back.

“Never let it be said I didn’t give you a chance, Corvo,” says Burrows when it’s over. He leaves, and Corvo’s twisted feet trail on the ground as they haul him back to his cell, gasping like a fish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I read Tridraconeus's fic Can't Maintain at http://archiveofourown.org/works/11443422 and then went hey, wouldn't it be cool to write about that thing in Coldridge. 8000-some words later I had created something far bigger... I hope you all enjoy. If you spot any typos or flubs, please feel free to let me know. :)
> 
> Also, since posting, I had someone look at my draft and they caught a number of things that I corrected/made better. If you're here re-reading this since 8/22/17 and noticed that anything's different, that's because it is.


	2. Eyes

Corvo slumps against the wall in the dark, cold cell, coated in cooling sweat, stiff fingers pressed between his legs for warmth. The taste of his dry retching lies thick on his tongue and makes his teeth feel chalky. His thigh cramps and he jerks in pain, gulps in the cold air. As he slowly stretches his leg flat on the cold concrete, he notices that something is different. Jenny is quiet. Her gossip partner across the hall is gone, the cell shuttered.

          Morning arrives with his tray of food crammed in the door. He grips the bars and hauls himself to his feet, balancing on the outsides of his soles. He must have slept, but he can’t remember being asleep, and he certainly doesn’t feel any better. Breakfast is the same bowl of thin and salty grey oats, and a cup of water. Both vessels are metal, dented and scratched. The edge of the cup scrapes Corvo’s lip as he drinks. There is a half-vial of red elixir on the tray, and Corvo inspects it briefly before downing it.

          “Morning, toots,” drawls the mess officer from down the hall. Corvo frowns. To his surprise, Jenny responds with a purr of “good to see you.” A bottle clinks against bars. “Three quarters ration for you today, since your beau went out on the block.” Corvo hears the sleazy grin in the man’s voice. “Orders from up top.”

          Someone across the hall spits, a gnarled thug with a ragged scar across his nose. “Wish I had tits like yous, Jen.” 

          “He weren’t my beau, but thank you kindly,” says Jenny. “You only wish you had tits like mine, Web. Wouldn’t call ‘em a burden exactly, but it’s not all fun and games.” The man—Web—scoffs. There are more sultry-sounding whispers from the hall, and then the guard’s footsteps move on.

          Corvo takes it in as he sits in his cell.

          And sits in his cell.

          And sits in his cell.

          He wishes he could get up and at least pace. He wishes he could stand up like a person with working toes and stretch. He wishes for something…anything. The pain settles into a background pulse, filling him with tension that he can’t stretch or breathe away.

          He sits like that, counting the minutes between the guard patrols, listening to Jenny attempt to strike up conversation with whoever will listen. He takes the hem of his dirty white shirt in his teeth and tears precious strips of cloth away, using them to bind his madly-bent toes together in clumps of two. Then he sits back down before the bars to listen to the noise of the prison.

          He dreams of red. He throws his head back to pour the last drops of elixir down his throat. When he lowers it, the man in the red coat is there. The long blade in his hand is the same red as the elixir, a thin sheen that drips onto the white stones. Emily is somewhere in her white coat, and he has to save Emily at least--because she’s in danger, he knows that much. He has to do something, anything. He tries to hold the red back, but it seeps up from under something white, and it won’t come off when he scrubs his hands on his coat. The man with the scar on his face holds him by the throat, and Corvo watches his own body crumple to the white stones. He can’t breathe, and when he wakes gasping, he doesn’t sleep again.

          Dawn comes with another paltry elixir ration in the same metal tube, a metal tumbler of water, and the same gaptoothed mess officer sneering down at him. Today’s offering is grey oats again and a piece of flat, stale bread. He sips at the thin oats. A fishbone sticks in his throat, and the mess officer laughs at him as he coughs.

“Hey, handsome,” says Jenny. “Cut the guy a break, he ain’t used to the fish porridge like the rest of us.”

          The cart moves on down the cellblock. Corvo pulls himself to his knees to watch as best he can.

          “If you ask me, he should be out on the chopping block with Meg Moraves today,” the guard grumbles. “I don’t know why we’re using all this state money to feed the man who killed Empress Jessamine.” Corvo’s lips curl.

          “Got me,” says Jenny. Corvo hears her turn up the charm. “Got an extra bit of bread there?”

          Corvo watches the guard hand her the bread off another person’s tray and tunes out the rest. He drinks half his cup of water, then hobbles over to the corner to lean on the wall and take an ill-tempered piss in his foul-smelling bucket.

          He has to get out of here, before they break more than his toes.

  

* * *

 

          They come for him later, a watch captain and three other men. They frog-march him down the halls, two to an arm. Corvo stumbles between them, scuffing at the concrete with his heels. The memory of the tongs is still fresh in his mind, and he  throws his weight against the guards. As they turn a corner, he drops like a stone and pushes off the wall, shoving himself back. A guard at his right yells, and one of them lets go in surprise. Corvo yanks his arm clear and punches the man in the face, teeth bared. The guard stumbles away, cursing. Someone in a cell nearby cheers.

One of the men on his left grabs him by the free shoulder—Corvo throws himself backwards and the man goes down under him. Corvo rolls off him just in time for the last guard to bring his heavy boot down on Corvo’s mangled toes.

          They drag him the rest of the way to the interrogation room.

          ===

          The brazier is cold today, but a large, dark jar sits on the table next to a long dipper and some small, glass eyedroppers. Neither the Interrogator nor Burrows are there, but Campbell is putting on a pair of heavy leather gloves. One of the officers strips him of his shirt and vest, throwing them on the floor.

          “Thank you, men,” he dismisses the guards. Then it is only the Lord Protector and the High Overseer.

          “Corvo,” he begins, “I know that, being from Serkonos,” the name of his homeland drips with scorn, “you’ve likely never been educated on the ways and tricks of the Outsider.” He uncaps the jug, which hisses, and pours its liquid into the long-handled pot. It glitters green in the whale-oil light, and the smell dredges up memories of brackish water and dark places, and gurgling spit. Corvo’s stomach rises to his throat, cold. “The Serkonan High Overseer tells me that the people there seem to be less concerned with the eternal fates of their souls.”

          Campbell picks up the pot and one of the eyedroppers. Walks around Corvo like a stalking animal. Corvo strains his neck, but the chair keeps him from turning far enough to watch the Overseer.

          “Here in Gristol, we at the Abbey care very much about the eternal fates of our member’s souls. This is why we have the Seven Strictures—to guard us from the wiles of the Outsider. Perhaps you’ve forgotten them in your guilt and shame.”

          Corvo rolls his eyes. It helps a little bit. He takes a deep breath.

          “If we begin from the seventh, the first is the errant mind.” Campbell’s voice is close behind him. Something bubbles, and a cold liquid drips across his scalp. The cold quickly becomes a tingle, then a burn. The smell is familiar, and he knows it then: river krust acid. It trickles down his neck, and he shivers in pain.

          “Second…the wanton flesh.”

          The air in the room suddenly feels solid in Corvo’s lungs. He has to be bluffing. He tilts his head back to look the High Overseer in the eye, and Campbell looks away, studiously blank. Corvo allows himself a thin smile.

          “Third, the rampant hunger.”

          The acid drips down his neck, his ribs. It feels like a fishhook dragging over his skin, catching in his muscles.

          “Fourth—the roving feet.”

          Campbell tips the pot gently, and the acid soaks into the wrappings on his toes. It feels almost good on the swollen flesh until it creeps under his nails, and Corvo hisses in pain.         

“Fifth. The restless hands.” There is nowhere Corvo can hide his hands, but Campbell pins them, one at a time, to the arms of the chair beneath his gloves. The rank liquid drips onto the soft flesh between his fingers, across his knuckles, his fingertips, the thin skin on the underside of his wrist. Corvo kicks involuntarily, his shin colliding hard with the metal cuff. It feels like being nibbled by a thousand, razor-sharp teeth, like being rubbed raw with the scraping wools they use in the tower kitchens. His skin reddens where the acid rolls, rising in welts. He can see pus-filled blisters forming in the sensitive places already.

          “Sixth,” says Campbell as he releases his hands, “the lying tongue.” Corvo’s fingers curl back in on themselves as the rest of him stiffens. Campbell prowls back behind him and the glove slips over his eyes, pins his head back helplessly. He keeps his lips clamped tightly shut—he has a sick premonition of what will happen next.

A cold drop skims the side of his nose, followed shortly by a hot-cold spattering on his lips. He clenches his jaw, not daring to struggle and risk his unburnt skin. Campbell wrenches his head further backward, and some of it seeps into his mouth. He spits, tries to blow some of the acid on his lips off in an aerosol. The glove moves to his mouth, and Corvo finds himself looking up into Campbell’s stony face. He smiles as he holds the eyedropper above Corvo’s eye.

“And last,” he says, “the wandering gaze.”

Corvo squeezes his eyes shut against the drop that falls, mercifully, on the soft skin below his right eye. He twists his head and the drop rolls down his cheek, away from danger. A second drop lands on his left eyebrow, soaks in. Campbell steps away.

“That’s why the last rites are so important, you see. If not laid to rest properly, the soul becomes a plaything of the Outsider, doomed to his carry out his whims for eternity. Do you know what it feels like to be a plaything of the Outsider, Corvo?” asks Campbell. “Do you know what fate awaits those who remain in the Void?”

          Campbell’s voice is calm.

“It’s something like this.”

          Campbell pours the pot of acid across his shoulders in one smooth motion. The cold makes Corvo flinch and gasp as it runs down his chest, pools in the muscles of his shoulders, trickles into his armpits. He shivers for a long moment before the chill becomes a tingle, then a burn. In the span of seconds, Corvo swings from shivering to being flayed alive. His head tilts back involuntarily, mouth gaping in a silent cry. The pain consumes him, whites his vision, pulls every muscle taut in a frantic bid at escape. But there is no escape from the acid that coats him, and he writhes helplessly in the chair, groaning and choking.

          He will not give the Overseer screams.

          Campbell returns to his field of vision, holding the eyedropper. He leans in as close as he dares. Corvo wrenches his head forward, lips peeled back, meets his gaze.

          “The fate of one condemned to the void is much worse than this,” says Campbell. “Is this really what you want? When you sign the confession, your soul will dissolve peacefully and suffer no more.”

          Corvo spits at him. The last thing he sees is his saliva, sliding down the Overseer’s nose, before Campbell slings the dregs of his pot into Corvo’s face.

      

* * *

 

          Corvo lies still for a long while after they take him back to his cell. He doesn’t bother putting his shirt back on, not wanting to lift his arms above his head or allow the cloth to touch his burns. But the cloth is mercifully dry, and so he presses his face into its grubby fabric and allows it to absorb the juice, the splash responsible for the raised red marks across his cheeks and nose, and the soft skin around his eyes. His left eye is swollen shut and runs with green tears, having taken the brunt of the slopped acid from Campbell’s pot. Every reflexive attempt at blinking brings a new stab of pain. He doubts if he would be able to see even if he could open it. When he moves, the tight expanses on his skin ache, like sunburns, and so it’s easier to just lay there on the cool cement like a corpse. When he breathes, he can feel his stomach swell and split.

          Jenny’s voice prattles away in the background. She’s telling a story about what sounds like a gang of prostitutes. She sounds drearier than usual as she plies the man in the cell next to her with opportunities to talk. He gives terse, one word answers.

          Corvo breathes in, breathes out. His body is a burning prison, and he longs for escape. He closes his eyes, but sleep eludes him. Images of the gazebo, of Jessamine, are printed on the inside of his eyelids.

          Jenny is still talking. He doesn’t know how long it’s been. He remains still and listens to her. The pain is worsening—every breath he takes hitches with agony, and he almost laughs. He needs to think about something else, anything, so when Jenny calls into the cellblock, “Don’t tell me nobody’s ever heard about how my bud Jim Fleabane got away with murder in front of the City Watch,” Corvo swallows hard and croaks out, “Tell me about it.”

          “Hey, the Lord Protector speaks at last!” says Jenny. Corvo winces. No privacy in prison, apparently. How many people know he’s here? How many people in this prison, inmate or no, want his guts on the floor? “I’ll tell you all about it,” she continues. Maybe she doesn’t care. “So Jim, right, he’s in with us Bottle Street guys. Walking the beat, keepin’ his eyes open for this one fella, name was Lionel, struck an agreement with Slackjaw about something or other that went sour. I don’t know what for, it’s not important. So anyway, he’s out with the boys, and they’re heading down the alley to where this guy’s supposed to live…”

          Corvo does his best to follow along, to lose his agony in the moldy, damp alleys of the distillery district. It works, a little. He cuts in at one point to question her description of a gang member somehow seducing a city watchman—“I don’t know how he did it either, but somehow it just worked,”—and when she finishes with Jim climbing a fifteen-foot wall to safety, he asks what happened to him next.

          “I don’t really know, to tell the truth,” Jenny says. “Same dogs nipped me and a couple others in a sting the next week, haven’t seen him since.” She pauses. “Obviously. But I hope he’s still runnin’.”

          “Good story,” says Corvo. His breath is shallow but even, and he almost doesn’t feel like screaming.

“Thanks,” says Jenny. “Didn’t even make it up.”

Corvo has his doubts about that, but keys rattle at the end of the hallway, and he hears the sound of wheels. It must be dinnertime. He gingerly moves to sit up, and yells in pain as his oozing back detaches from the cement.


	3. Skin

Corvo realizes that he doesn’t know how long he’s been in prison. Time seems to hang in freefall. He takes a pebble from the deteriorating cement floor, scratches a couple tally marks into the wall—he returned home on the seventh of the Month of Hearths, and it’s been a fortnight since then at least. It’s been three days since his bath in krust acid, and his scabs move against each other like continental plates. His left eye is mostly swollen shut, and when he peels it open, its vision is clouded.

          “How long have you been here?” he asks Jenny.

          “Couple months, I think,” she replies. “It was the Month of High Cold when I came in.”

          “It’s the Month of Hearths,” says Corvo. “Or Seeds by now, perhaps.”

          “Really?” asks Jenny.

“Quiet, inmates!” The guards are not consistent about enforcing silence—it varies from man to man, or sometimes even hour to hour. But every now and then, some man decides it’s time for the inmates to shut their yaps. Corvo brings his voice down, whispers as loud as he dares. “What did you do?”

          “Nabbed in a Watch raid,” she says back in the same tone. “I collected for the folks on Bottle Street, helped keep the books too. Mostly I did the ones we couldn’t get in the door for…I hate being the one to always seduce the guys, but as long as I can get away to open the door when the kneecappers come knockin’, it’s alright. Or it was, anyway. Until the other night a group of mots from the watch come knockin’ instead of the kneecappers, and they’ve got a guy with them I’ve seen before—seen a little too much of, if I’m honest—and he points at me like I’m the Outsider, come from the Void himself, and he yells “That’s her! That’s the bottle whore!” Jenny snorts. “Pointed with his cane, too. I mean, there’s drama, and then there’s too much drama. Anyway I ran back into the house and looked for the back door, cause I knew I’d seen one somewhere, but I got lost on the way to the kitchen and ended up at gunpoint in some closet. And now I’m here. Have been for a bit. I don’t even know what I’m charged with, but the man tells me I’m getting out in a bit.”

          “That’s quite a story,” says Corvo. “Glad you’re getting out.”

          “Don’t say it too loud, now,” says Jenny. There is silence for a moment.

          “How about you, Lord Protector?” she asks. “What happened?”

          Corvo stays silent for a long time. The wind outside changes, and he smells the bucket in the corner.

          “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t—“ He breaks off, tilts his head back to stare at the ceiling. The scabs on his neck grate against each other.

          “The Spymaster, Burrows, had a thing to do with it,” he says. Stops, chokes out the next words. “I-- _didn’t_ \--kill her.” He bites his sore-ridden lip, tries to control his breath. “There was a man, in a mask and a man without a mask, and he—he was the one that—“ Tears are rolling down his face now, not just from his burnt eye. They soothe the sores on his face. He inhales, holds the breath like it might be his last. “I. Didn’t—I couldn’t—“

          He feels the grip of invisible hands on him again, suspended in midair, unable to look away.

“Shhhh,” hushes Jenny. He looks through the bars frantically, looking for the guard, before he realizes that she is not trying to keep them out of trouble. It’s so unexpected, such a suddenly understanding sound, a spot of kindness in the dismal landscape of the last month, that he sobs in relief.

          The food cart is late that night, and the man pushing it is irate. Corvo cradles his metal bowl of cooled grey soup, disks of cold yellow fat floating on the top. He slurps them off, ignoring the way the grease dissolves to grains in his mouth. He needs all the nutrition he can get. He drinks the rest of the broth to reveal a lumpy mass at the bottom of the bowl that he figures to be fish, speckled with small pieces of carrot. He scrapes it out with his fingers and eats it, making a small pile of the bones on the concrete next to him. It feels desperate, but maybe they’ll be useful for something later. He washes the overly salty taste of the broth out of his mouth with the last of his water from the morning, stands with only a groan of pain, and places his bowl and cup onto the food ledge.

He hears soft murmurs from B6, and looks down the hall. The mess officer is standing in front of Jenny’s cell, close to the bars.

Very close. Corvo frowns, tries to get a better angle. One of the mess officer’s hands is in Jenny’s cell, at breast height.

Corvo remembers the story of why Jenny is in prison in the first place. The mess officer breaks away, leers into Jenny’s cell. “Later, sweetlips. Two days, dinnertime.”

Two days? Corvo grasps this nugget of information, ducks back into his cell and acts as natural as he can. The mess officer stops in front of his cell, sees his empty bowl and flashes him a humorless, gaptoothed grin. Two days?

“Lookit that…clean plate club for the Lord Protector tonight.” Corvo glowers at the mention of his old title. Some job he’d done.

        

* * *

 

          “Part of why I like talking to you is because you really sound like you’re listening,” says Jenny. “Even…if you’re not, you sound like you are.”

          The sun is rising from behind Dunwall Tower out Corvo’s window. He can hear the rattling calls of kingsparrows from the river as they dive for bugs. Corvo rolls “two days” over in his head, scratches another tally into the green paint. One day, now.

          “It’s nice to listen,” he says. “It makes it easier to not be here.”

          “Glad my coping mechanism can be someone else’s, then,” says Jenny. “Mum always said I was a prattler. Went on and on about it, she did.” She pauses. “Hey, come to think of it, maybe this is all cause of my mum.”

          “Isn’t it always,” says Corvo. Jenny snorts. There’s a momentary silence, and Corvo goes for it.

          “Two days, huh?”

          More silence. Corvo looks and listens as hard as he can for any guards or prying eyes, prying ears, but finds none. He lowers his voice as far as he can go.

          “Take me with you.”

          The silence continues. Corvo can hear the blood rushing in his ears. Jenny sighs.

          “Sure,” she says. “I don’t believe you actually did what everyone says you did. If you did, you’re a really good actor, but I don’t think you are.” She sighs. “Things are rarely so simple as you’re told. I’ve found that out so many times. And you’re a decent listener.” She grumbles. “Mum always said I was a sap…”

          Corvo tries to tamp down his hope, with little success. He tries to hate that he can’t quash it, but he doesn’t succeed at that either.

* * *

 

          Corvo counts five guards in that day’s escort before they pin his crackling, scabbed arms behind him and cram a sack over his head. He walks between them on his heels, toes held awkwardly off the ground. He can’t see much and the bag smells like oats—probably extra from the kitchen. Bits of dust and grain get in his good eye, and he sneezes.

          The light dims, and hands squeeze Corvo’s oozing arms and handle him into the chair he now knows so well. He inhales sharply as the cold metal touches his bare, raw skin.

          “Thank you, gentlemen. That will be all.” It’s the voice of Burrows. Corvo looks uselessly towards where it sounds like the Regent is, listens. Heavy footsteps come from somewhere else, off to his right. The Interrogator. His vision begins to adjust to the dark, and he can make out a yellow glow. His shins are warm, and he realizes: today, they are going to brand him.

          “It’s a shame, really,” says Burrows. Is he really going to talk at him again like this? “The Lord Protector, a traitor to his state and to his Empress.” Corvo ignores him in favor of watching the glow of the embers though the gaps in the weave of his sack. It occurs to him that maybe they’ve hooded him to keep him from spitting on them.

“Why did you kill her, Corvo?” asks Burrows. “What was your motive? Some underhanded plot to seize power for yourself? Maybe for your true lord, the duke of Serkonos?” Corvo hears the man pacing in front of him. “Or maybe you wanted to claim the regency until Emily was fit to rule. Were you going to kill me too, Corvo?”         

          “You can’t gaslight me, Burrows,” he says through the sack. “They say that you fear in others what you see in yourself.”     

          “You _will_ sign this confession, Attano,” says Burrows. “Even if it’s the last thing you do before your head rolls.”

          Corvo has only a moment’s notice as the hairs on his chest crisp before the hot poker digs into his breast. His flesh hisses, and the noise that explodes from his throat is animal, a wordless scream of agony. He jerks, arms pulling at the restraints. The edges dig into his skin. The scream rips at his throat. The pain is like the sea, and it stretches on and on, as far as his mind will go, encircling it, never-ending. He chokes on his own spit as the poker is dragged slowly down his chest, leaving a line of fire behind it. He shakes the chair as he spasms.

          A few seconds later, the poker is removed. He sags, breath coming in ragged sobs. There’s a line down his chest that feels burnt into his very ribs, a trail of white-hot pain like his skin has been flayed away with razor wire. He coughs into the hot wetness of the oat sack, wheezes. The faintly appetizing smell of his own burnt flesh reaches his nostrils. Something oozes down his face, his scabs torn apart.

Air whistles and hot metal hits him in the shin, then the kneecap. He jerks weakly. When the yellow-hot tip of the iron is laid on his collarbone, he lets loose a pathetic wail and succumbs to the darkness of the void.

          Then he’s being held up by two pairs of strong arms as his broken toes trail along the ground. The pain is what brings him back to reality as his head lolls. He looks at the letters on the ground, flips them upside down, and realizes he is in front of his own cell.

          The guards are talking. His cell door is open. He drags his mind through the sticky black mud of pain to the here and now.

          “Just a _second_ ,” someone is grousing. “I’ve literally got a bucket of shit in my hand and you want me to hurry up?”

          “Well, if you’ve got a bucket of shit you won’t mind moving fast,” says a voice by his ear. “You go dump the shit out _there_ , and we’ll dump our shit in _here_ ,” someone brandishes his arm for emphasis, “and then we’ll all feel better. Get a move on.”

          “Alright, alright.”

They don’t know he’s awake. He struggles to not raise his head or tense his muscles. The door to his cell is open, and they’re not paying attention to him.

                                                        

          He breathes in as deep as he can, feels scabs cracking. Then he drops his weight onto the outside of one foot and kicks one of his captors as hard as he can in the side of the knee. The man stumbles with a curse and Corvo kicks the same place again, downing him. He takes the other guard with him, and Corvo swings his head around, eyes alight, to deliver a brute punch to the third man’s nose. It crunches under his knuckles, and he jerks his arm free of the _last hand_ to kick in the guard’s knee. The man drops with a yell. An arm wraps around his throat from behind, crushes his windpipe—Corvo kicks off his cell bars to drop on top of the guard. The air rushes out of the lungs beneath him in a _whuff_ , and Corvo rolls off as quick as a fish to, for a glorious moment, stand free.

          The man holding his bucket starts backwards into the cell in fright. Corvo advances forward, summoning _murder_ to his face, trying to hold the man there with sheer fright. He sees the man’s eyes flick quickly to the bucket in his hand, and Corvo slams the cell door shut to avoid having his own refuse slung at him. The guard runs forward and pulls on the bars, but the door, it seems, has locked shut.

 It’s nice to have something go his way every now and then, thinks Corvo.

          “Outsider’s crooked cock!” exclaims Jenny. The other inmates are howling. Corvo brings his bare foot down on the neck of a man who tries to get to his feet, then frisks him. He finds what he’s looking for hanging on the guard’s belt, and rips it free of the leather tie. The weight of the brassy key fills him with power, and he tries it in Jenny’s lock as she sputters.

          “Didn’t think you had it in you for insurrection! We’re gonna get killed!” she says as he slides the cell door open.

          “Didn’t feel like waiting,” Corvo mutters. His heart pounds, adrenaline sharpening his focus and allowing him to stand upright. He can’t feel the pain from his toes, his eye, or the long, pink weal that runs down his ribs. He glances at the blackened flesh, then grimaces and looks away. The adrenaline won’t last forever. He casts a glance at an unconscious guard’s boots. They look about his size.

Jenny steps out of her cell, and he hands her the key. “I see your game, Attano. Good thing this row is full of Bottle Streeters,” she says as she heads to the next cell. “Fighters. Time to go, Marvin.” A shave-headed man with ragged mutton chops claps her on the back as he walks free. She hands him the key. Corvo tosses her one more from another guard’s coat, and a baton from one’s belt. Marvin runs down the row, and before long the cellblock is full of inmates itching to break knees, jumping down from the balconies and rattling the cellblock bars. Corvo kneels over one guard’s unconscious body, unlaces his boots, slips them on. They’re a decent fit, and he ties the laces in a sloppy double knot and stands. Jenny is rifling through an unconscious man’s pockets.

          “Where’s your man?” asks Corvo. The boots make him feel close to normal. He eyes the crowd, hears yells coming from the other end of the cellblock and spots blue coats. One inmate in the crowd near him meets his eyes, and Corvo sees recognition and hatred flash in them before he is shoved out of sight.

          “Kitchens,” says Jenny, following his gaze. An alarm blares. “Let’s go before someone lynches you.”

    

* * *

 

          He lets Jenny lead the way, partially because he’s covered in scabs and bruises and half-starved, and partially because Jenny seems familiar with the practice of beating heads in. They arrive at the kitchens mercifully unscathed. It’s empty but for their mess officer in the back under the whale-oil lights, next to a cart with a few wooden crates on it. One crate stands empty, a red crowbar and the lid by its side. The mess officer gives Jenny a smile, Corvo a wary frown.

          “You didn’t tell me you were bringin’ _him_. You said a _friend_.”

          “He is my friend,” says Jenny. Corvo stares at the man with the most murderous gaze he can muster, hoping to intimidate him into compliance. After all, as far as anyone knows, he’s already a murderer. The mess officer, looking compliant but put-upon, gestures to the open crate. It’s full of apple cores and fish bones, food scraps, crawling with flies. “As promised,” he says to Jenny. “Trash crate headed out to the family hog farms inland. Ain’t pretty, but the hounds won’t find you.”

          “How do we know these crates don’t just get dumped straight in the Wrenhaven?” asks Corvo.

          “Well, you’re just gonna have to trust me,” says the guard. He shifts uneasily, tilts his head to listen to the commotion upstairs. “And if you wanna get out of here, it’s gotta be in the bins with you now.”

          Jenny climbs into the coffin-shaped box. The mess of food squelches under her, and she mimes gagging. Corvo smiles in spite of himself. She flashes him a quick salute. “Pleasure to have met you,” she says. He nods.

          “Likewise.”

          The mess officer shakes his head as he lowers the planks back onto the top of the bin, and Jenny is gone. He taps the nails back in with the hefty crowbar, and turns to Corvo. The noises from upstairs grow more distinct. Corvo can hear gunshots.

          “As for you, Lord Protector…”

          Corvo’s eyes dart to the crowbar, long and deadly, then to the man’s face. There is cunning there, the look of a man holding the winning hand at Nancy.

          The crowbar swings back…

          Corvo leaps back as the crowbar whistles through the space where his knees once were, stumbles. He ducks another swipe at his face and tackles the man into the crate behind him. The crowbar clatters to the ground. Jenny yells something, muffled. Corvo punches the man in the face, then scoops up the crowbar and sprints for the stairs, takes them two at a time. If he can just get lost in the fray, maybe he can find another way out.

          “Hey!”

          A group of watch guards turn the corner and spot him. One of them points at him. “Stop right there, prisoner!”

          Corvo turns to run, finds himself staring into the face of the mess officer. He brings the crowbar up in a desperate swing, but someone grabs it from behind and kicks in the back of his knee, and Corvo crumples to the ground. He scrambles to his feet, a being of adrenaline and muscle, and makes it a few steps—

          “Clear the line!”

          --before the shot rings out. His body jerks to the left and he falls, sliding a few feet on his belly. His left arm is wet and _isn’t_ _moving,_ and he feels goosebumps break out over his skin as his heart seizes in his chest. He’s getting his legs under him to get up and run, run, run, when a heavy, steel-toed boot plants itself on his neck.

His legs kick and slide out from under him, and he drops to the ground as purple and green spots bloom in his vision. He feels his lungs suck inwards as they try to pull breath through his crushed windpipe.

          “Look at that,” someone says. “It’s Attano.”

          “No shit.”

          “Figures,” replies another guard.

          Corvo shudders and goes limp as the stars consume his vision, his mouth working like a beached fish. They cuff him to the bars of an empty cell and leave him in a pool of his own blood.


	4. Blood

The interrogation room is bright, brighter than a clear day on the docks or a Serkonan afternoon in high summer. The bandage on his shattered arm is dirty and soaked through with crusted blood. Corvo groans and forces his head upright on his shoulders. Burrows clicks his tongue.

          “Quite a state we’re all in,” he says. “And all because someone decided they were going to break the rules. There are plenty of rules here at Coldridge, but they are all designed to keep it running. The guards are kept safe from the prisoners, the public kept is safe from the prisoners, and the prisoners are kept safe from each other.”

          The Interrogator is holding a blade similar to ones he’s seen in Sokolov’s hands. Surgical.

          “One of those rules is the no talking rule,” says Burrows. “And when prisoners break the rules, it’s very important to make sure they don’t do it again.”

          No, thinks Corvo.

          The Interrogator steps forward with a pair of pliers. The knife on the table gleams—it does not look sharp. “No,” croaks Corvo.

The Interrogator takes a hold of his jaw. Corvo clenches his teeth, presses his lips together. The Interrogator pinches his neck viciously, and when Corvo gasps in pain he pulls his mouth open and, quick as a fish, seizes his tongue in a pair of pliers. Corvo wails wordlessly as, with his other hand, he reaches for the knife.

          “There are certain things you need to sign a confession, Corvo,” says Burrows. “A _tongue_ is not one of them.”

          The knife is cold. Corvo screams as the taste of his own blood bursts in his mouth, then coughs violently as he chokes on it. The blade slices his lip, and he howls in agony as a pink scrap of flesh is lifted away from him. The Interrogator holds it up for Burrows to inspect, and he waves it away with a look of disgust. The Interrogator touches it gently, then tosses it away onto the ground by the drain.

Corvo is drowning in his own blood. It pours down his throat. It coats his teeth and runs down his chin, spattering onto his shirt with every cough and sob. He tries to cry no, no, no, but there’s a sickeningly open space in his mouth. He can’t reach the back of his teeth.

This is the worst part.

          “Take him back,” says Burrows over him. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

         

* * *

                                 

          The taste of blood grew sour and rotten in the corners of his mouth as the weeks passed, a metallic rot that permeated his mouth. Every day, after a meal clumsily choked down or left on the tray, he scratched another tally mark into the green paint. He bore whips and fists, needles and acid, starvation and boredom and suffering, wasting away into a shadow of the man he once was. He was prepared to never see the outside world again when he found a key beneath a hunk of unswallowable bread and broke for the sewers. The boatman wondered why he didn’t speak, but held his own tongue.

          A junior prison guard hosed out the interrogation room, washing the scrap of flesh that once spoke in Corvo Attano’s mouth down the drain and into the Wrenhaven. An opportunistic hagfish, migrating back through the river to spawn at sea ,snapped it up. At sea, the hagfish swam along the sides of a great brindled whale, thinking it was a cliff. The whale opened its toothy maw and swallowed the hagfish, along with a dozen of its schoolmates.

          Weeks later, a barbed harpoon pierced the whale’s flank. After a great struggle, it was hoisted onto a whaling ship called the Delilah and carried, groaning, back to the Greaves slaughterhouse. When the humans had taken all that they could, its bones were tossed out into the estuary, where newly spawned hagfish nibbled them white and clean.

At certain low tides of the month, mudlarks dared each other to go out into the muddy marshes and look for treasures. One had been offered a handsome sum by a local woman, the wife of a pig farmer, to bring back any bones. He needed the coin, so he waded out into the marsh, risking the hagfish, to bring back both of the ribs he could carry to the pig farmer’s mother. He thought that the kitchen hand, head bent low over a table as she peeled apples, smelled like a compost heap--but he did not say so.

          The pig farmer’s mother carefully sawed the ribs in pieces, bathing some in rat blood and others in the pollen of foreign flowers. She whittled half-remembered sigils from the depths of her memory into them with her paring knife. When the Overseers questioned her, they threw her work into a jumbled bin of bones marked “Heretical Artifacts”, and sent it to the Abbey.

          When Corvo Attano stole though the rooms of the Office of the High Overseer, searching for a trace of the Heretic’s Brand, he came across a box that sang to him and made the mark on his hand itch. He found one, a piece of gently curved white, that sang in his voice—and when he pinned it to his vest, it made him feel like maybe he could sing, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, everyone! I haven't flexed my writing muscles in So Long. This was fun, and I hope to write more things for you all in the future.


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